


jelly roll

by sinead



Category: NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 18:31:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinead/pseuds/sinead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lance and Chris and new vocabulary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	jelly roll

**Author's Note:**

> (Made up. Not true. Chimerical. Fanciful. Imaginary. Suppositious. Fiction.)

Shopping was one of the tour distractions. Everyone liked to prowl through electronics stores, and window shop for clothes, even though they seldom bought much. You wanted the clothes you wore on the bus to have been washed so many times they felt like pajamas, and that was what you wore for ninety percent of the time during a tour. JC liked to go to book stores. Justin liked to look at jewelry. Joey, stoically weathering the combined teasing of the rest of them, liked to go into furniture stores, where he would sit on the couches and check out the dining room tables and the children's bedroom sets.

Chris dragged them all into second hand record stores. Joey accused him of having memorized the location of every single one in the United States. He and JC and Justin were good for about twenty minutes of looking at records, and then they would begin to get bored. Second hand record stores, during the kind of weekday doldrum hours they tended to frequent them, were like church, Lance decided. Full of serious devotees who would look up, annoyed, when Joey and JC began to scuffle, or Justin made jokes in a too-loud voice. The thought of a whole store full of music that still managed not to have one 'Nsync recording in it made Justin nervous, and eventually, the three of them would leave, in search of jewelry, or furniture, or ice cream.

Lance would linger, wandering in and out of Chris' orbit as he searched the bins. He liked flipping through the old albums of country artists, and if he found one where the cover was in good condition, say a Patsy Cline, or a Hank Williams, he would sometimes buy it. The staff at these stores were invariably eccentric, with wildly catholic tastes in music. Lance once had a conversation about Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs with a black man who had an enormous Afro and a little curved stainless steel bar piercing his septum; he was the store's owner, and confessed that he felt their early, pre-Opry recordings were the best. The staff people would solemnly take Lance's record selections from his hands and reverantly place them on the turntable and play them, so that he could hear the condition of the vinyl. He never had the heart to tell them that he really didn't care about the records, he just wanted the covers--he often already had the recording on a cd. He didn't say that he was really just spending time in the vicinity of Chris, just the two of them, and all these quiet, preoccupied strangers, who never looked at them twice. Some days, that felt like Lance's idea of heaven.

Chris himself was as quiet as he ever got in record stores. With an expression of fierce concentration, he would start at one end of the rock/blues/r &amp; b section, and work his way down the rows, acquiring a stack of records as he went. Occasionally, if he found a particularly rare or long-sought treasure, he would softly call Lance over and show it to him, and Lance would stand close enough to look over his shoulder and make noises of appreciation. Then would come the process of winnowing at the turntable, rejecting the albums that were too worn. Lance would watch quietly, as Chris, and all the staff present in the store, and often some of the other customers, would gather around the speakers and close their eyes while they listened. Chris was ruthless in his standards, and everyone would nod in sad agreement with him when he vetoed the Lovin' Spoonful for the scratch in the third track, or the Delfonics because it had a tendency to skip. Sometimes he left with an armful of records; sometimes with two, or one, or none, but whatever the results, these were always some of Lance's favorite afternoons on a tour.

This afternoon, though, had been occupied with a FreeLance meeting. Lance was about to open the door of his hotel room, counting the seconds until he could take off the suit he was wearing. It was always wise to wear a suit when dealing with recording industry lawyers, he had learned--they were less likely to treat him as if he had a thirty second attention span and a ten word vocabulary. He heard his name.

"Hey, Lance!" Chris' voice came through the open door of his room across the hall. "Bassmaster Lance!" He appeared at the door, his hair standing even more wildly on end than usual. "C'mere."

"Can you hang on for just a minute?"

"C'moooon," Chris lunged across the hall and grabbed his hand, dragging him in and kicking the door shut behind them. Chris' room appeared to have been the site of some sort of explosion, one that involved many pairs of wildly colored boxers. "What are you dressed as, man?" Chris said quizzically.

"I kind of wanted to change--" Lance started to say, but Chris was rushing on, "Got something you have to hear, you're gonna love it." He released Lance's hand, and crossed the room via the most direct route, which involved bouncing across the unmade bed. Lance took the more sedate detour around the furniture. Chris was pawing through stacks of cds and tape cases on the table by the window, muttering.

"is this, no, not that one, it was right here--hah!" He turned, smiling gleefully and said, "Remember that record place we went to in Chicago last year?"

Lance cast his mind back. "That day it was so cold, right? And Joey and Justin were with us, and they whined the whole time because it was too cold to walk anyplace else." It was true that it had been cold, and the wind whipping down the city streets practically took strips out of your hide, but Lance had still been annoyed with Joey and Justin that day, and wished that they had followed JC's lead, and stayed in the hotel.

"They're such pussies." Chris was turning to his boombox and loading up the tape.

Lance frowned at Chris' back. "I don't remember you buying anything that day. We weren't there very long." Chris would make tapes of his favorite rarities and bring them on tour, along with pictures of Busta. It was a way to recreate a feeling of home--they all did something. Justin carried a box of Ivory Snow detergent that he gave to the laundry staff that washed their clothes, because that was what his mother used.

"That's 'cause I took a chance, and bought this without listening to it. Then when I got it home and listened to it, I thought of you."

"Me?" Lance was slightly surprised. "Is it Garth Brooks' granddaddy, or something?"

"Just wait." Chris swept aside clothes, magazines and Gameboy cartridges to create an open space on the bed, and said, "Siddown, you are going to love this. Here." He thrust the tape cartridge case into Lance's hand, and gave him a gentle shove.

A deep, growly sound filled the room, backed by the country sounding twang of a guitar and a stand-up bass. The voice was female, but not feminine, and the music was rhythmic and deceptively simple. It made the hairs on Lance's arms lift. He looked at the case, lettered with Chris' tiny, almost illegible handwriting. Lily 'Lone Bell' Boutrelle, he read. Delta Blues From the Great Depression. Song titles were listed; Don't Bring Me No Bad News. Rattlin' Stomp. Bad Girl Blues. Empty Bed Blues.

He looked up at Chris, who was standing in front of him with his eyes closed, exactly as he did in the second hand record stores. He was swaying, a little. "_Don't bring me no bad news_," Lily 'Lone Bell' Boutrelle wailed from the speaker, "_my baby ain't comin' round no more_." Without opening his eyes, Chris murmured, "you should totally sing this stuff, man. You've got the perfect voice for it."

Lance smiled, and said, "Can you see JC's face if I tell him I want to have a solo on 'Bad Girl Blues'?" He looked down at the case again. "Or 'Jelly Roll Man'?"

"Shh, that one's next," said Chris, and so Lance shushed and they both listened to the singer moan and plead, "_gimme that sweet, sweet jelly roll/I wanna roll it all night long_". This chorus was repeated several times, and on the last, Chris harmonized softly, his voice unearthly and flutelike against the woman's deep tones. Lance watched him, not realizing that he was staring until Chris suddenly opened his eyes and laughed, a little self-consciously. He flopped down on the bed next to Lance and reached for the tape case.

"It's really great," he said, and Lance, who was much too aware of the press of Chris' arm against his own, said the only thing that came to mind, which was,

"Jelly roll?"

Chris shot him a look, sidelong. "Don't tell me I have to explain to a Mississippi boy like you what 'jelly roll' means." Lance shrugged. "Bass, sometimes you are so white bread. Your _jelly roll_, man! What you grab on that stage every night to make the little girls go crazy."

"oh," Lance said, and felt himself blush, a little. He didn't actually grab it. He was too embarassed to really touch himself onstage, unlike Justin, who considered that move to be just another weapon in his arsenal. Lance had devised a method of grabbing the loose material at the crotch of his costumes, that looked pretty convincing when he did it in the mirror. He cleared his throat, and said, "Justin's the one that gets the screams for that maneuver."

"Yeah? You think?" Chris was looking at him. He had a tiny, unreadable smile on his face. He turned on the bed so that they were almost face to face. Lily Boutrelle growled in the background. "'Cause I like the way you do it," he said.

"I, um," said Lance, and then Chris slowly leaned in closer and slowly brushed Lance's lips with his own. Lance felt the soft prickle of his goatee, and it seemed like he couldn't breathe, and then Chris slipped a hand inside his suit jacket and touched his side. After that, he could breathe, he was gasping for breath, as he ran his hand up under Chris' t-shirt, up the smooth skin of his back, and then Chris pushed him back down onto the bed and they were kissing. Chris' skin was hot through his shirt and the thin cotton of his baggy shorts. It almost felt like he was naked in Lance's arms, and Lance tilted his hips up and moaned a little as the zipper of his suit pants pressed back into his flesh.

Chris pulled his mouth off of Lance's and pressed his own hips down. "Jelly roll," he whispered. "Do you like the music?"

"I love it," Lance whispered back, and he did.

"Do you want to take off that suit now?"

"_yeah_," Lance breathed as Chris began to unbutton his shirt for him, "right now."

Eventually the tape ran out, and Lily 'Lone Bell' Boutrelle fell silent, but neither of them noticed. As Chris pointed out later, they could always listen to it again.


End file.
